


exit 102

by weisjenga



Category: ASTRO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Convenience Store, Fluff, M/M, angsty for one second, astrophysics student mj, copious references to astronomers, truck driver jinjin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 16:42:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15053483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weisjenga/pseuds/weisjenga
Summary: it was during these nights with jinwoo, in a tiny gas station convenience store on the side of a dirt road, hardly anything else around for miles, that slowly, slowly, myungjun considered letting his universe be rewritten.





	exit 102

            _Epitome of Copernican Astronomy._ Page 1. Myungjun stared blankly down at the page, wondering what a sentence was and whether Mr. Johannes Kepler could have written a normal one. Over two hours had passed since the start of his shift and he glanced at the time yet again, to find that in fact, he’d been here for five minutes and _not_ two hours. At the very least, Myungjun was sure that this book was one he started reading three weeks ago, and here he was, on the first page. He sighed and let the book fall shut.

            Just as Myungjun pulled out a physics text, ready to calculate the refractive index of his tears, the door opened. A man with bleached hair walked in. Myungjun thought he looked so _cool_ , knees peeking through ripped blue jeans, tan skin against a white shirt. Through tired eyes and the fluorescent lights of the gas station convenience store, he saw the other smile at him.

            Not that Myungjun particularly paid attention to everyone who came by – honestly, the sorts of people who came to convenience stores any time after midnight often terrified him – but he’d certainly never seen anyone so handsome. Moments later, the man stood in front of the counter, chips, jerky, and energy drink in hand. Myungjun wanted to know what kind of person would want an energy drink at this hour, but he said nothing as he remembered that he, too, had a half-empty can beside him. He looked up at the customer, who was gazing rather pitifully at Kepler’s work. As non-judgementally as possible, Myungjun scanned his items, and they exchanged a sympathetic look.

            “Have a good night,” Myungjun said, out of obligation, throwing in his best I-definitely-want-to-be-here smile.

            “You too,” the other man replied. “If you can, that is,” he added, gesturing to _Epitome of Copernican Astronomy,_ which was unfortunately not the epitome of Myungjun’s enjoyment.

            At 12:07 a.m., Myungjun was alone again.

 

            Four days after the first mutual energy drink judgement, Myungjun was interrupted from a thrilling installment of Tycho Brahe’s _Introduction to the New Astronomy_ by the light chiming of the door. He peered over the edge of the can he had to his mouth and saw a mop of blond hair. As the owner of the hair walked between the aisles, Myungjun stayed behind all the safety of his too-sweet energy drink, following the movement. Suddenly, there were items being placed on the counter, and he could see a face rather clearly beyond the edges of the can. He noted that it probably hadn’t been a smart idea to be pouring liquid into his mouth for so long, now left with an uncomfortable mouthful of blue raspberry flavour to try and voice a greeting around.

            A sandwich and a drink to match his own loomed on the counter in front of him. More closely this time, Myungjun observed the unfairly handsome man who apparently liked to visit convenience stores at three in the morning. Too soon, he was placing a receipt in large hands and forcing out a _goodnight._

            “Are you here every night?” The other spoke slowly, clearly. Myungjun nodded and smiled with all the energy he had left (which should have been more, according to the label on his drink). “We’ll be seeing more of each other, then.”

            Usually, Myungjun was wary of people who said these sorts of things in such a setting, but in the two times they had met, Myungjun hadn’t had anyone try to murder him. So, pointing to his name tag, he introduced himself. “I’m Myungjun. I’ll supply you with energy drinks. Maybe not this brand though, it doesn’t seem to work that well,” he paused, yawning. “But it tastes alright, as far as energy drinks go.”

            “I’ll be sure to try a different one next time,” the man chuckled. “Try not to drink too many of those, they’re not very good for you. I’m Jinwoo, by the way.”

            “But you drink them,” Myungjun pointed out. He noticed that Jinwoo couldn’t have been much older than himself, if at all, and wondered again why the other wasn’t in bed, like any other sane person would want to be. Like _he_ wanted to be. But he needed the extra money and he was at school all day, so he was left to spend his nights here.

            “I do, and it’s terrible,” Jinwoo said and opened his can. “Need to stay awake for a while.”

            “Same,” agreed Myungjun, poking his stack of papers with a limp finger.

            “Well, I’ll see you in a few days. Take care of yourself, okay?” Jinwoo walked out of the store, humming a vaguely familiar tune that sounded a bit too cheery for the dead of night.

           

            Myungjun woke to someone insistently poking his hand. Why was he asleep? He shouldn’t have been asleep. With a start, Myungjun sat up, a leaf of paper still stuck to his face as he rubbed his eyes. Blinking a few times, he brought the store into focus.

            “Jinwoo,” sleepily, he smiled, paper detaching itself from his cheek. The last time Myungjun had checked, he was trying to keep himself awake with doodles of various planets.

            “Hey,” Jinwoo replied. He leaned in a little closer, squinting at Myungjun. “I think you have a Saturn printed on your cheek.”

            A glimpse of his reflection in the window confirmed that Jinwoo was correct. Immediately, Myungjun rubbed at it, but succeeded only in smudging rings across his nose. He sighed and stifled a yawn, reaching for his soul in a can, but his hand was smacked away by Jinwoo before he could revive himself. Myungjun grunted in protest. It was midterm season, which meant an extra pile of work on top of his regular studying, working towards his Master’s in astrophysics.

            Weeks had passed since the first time Jinwoo set foot into the store. Jinwoo, as Myungjun had learned, drove a regular shipping route in an impressively sized truck. After the first time he’d visited, scoping out the roads, he came at exactly sixteen minutes past three every morning, twice a week. Their conversations were brief. A few stolen minutes before Jinwoo disappeared back to his truck to rest, but Myungjun started looking forward to the moments a crooked smile would burst through his door.

            Tonight, placed next to a ridiculously bright drink on his counter, was a bottle of water. Jinwoo had become set on trying every single energy drink they carried and kept a record of each one, in hopes of finding the best. However, as far as Myungjun could recall, water was not sugary and dangerously caffeinated.

            “You look a little…tired,” Jinwoo said as Myungjun failed to press the right buttons to open the cash drawer.

            “Yeah, it’s because I’m tired,” Myungjun flopped down onto the stool. He was aware that he had bags under his eyes big enough to hold his textbooks and then some, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept more than four hours in a row. Jinwoo appeared genuinely concerned when he told Myungjun to get some sleep after his shift. Even though they both very well knew it would be unlikely, Myungjun nodded.

            That night, after Jinwoo left, Myungjun noticed the bottle of water was still sitting on his counter. He picked it up to store it away for the other’s next visit, but as he turned it over, he noticed the writing on the label. In blocky, even letters: _For you!_

            Myungjun didn’t like the way his heart fluttered. Perhaps, he also couldn’t remember the last time someone else had tried to care for him.

 

            How lovely it would be to be the sun, Myungjun thought, poring over Nicolaus Copernicus’ _Commentariolus._ If he was the sun, then Jinwoo could be every celestial sphere. All the planets and moons and other stars that always came back around to light up the night. Like a calculated passing of a meteor, Jinwoo walked through the door.

            Sparkly eyes in awful lighting and a smile with _adorably_ crooked teeth – not that Myungjun was paying _any_ attention to that, not at all – approached him. Jinwoo took forty-five seconds longer than usual to make his regular trip through the aisles. He arrived back at the counter with a large armful of snacks that could have lasted Myungjun three days, two in his current state.

            “Jinwoo, isn’t it dangerous to eat and drive at the same time?” Myungjun picked up a bag of pretzels and stared at it in awe.

            “Probably,” Jinwoo shrugged. “But they’re not for me.”

            “Oh.” Acting as if he wasn’t disappointed, which was easy to do because _he had no reason to be,_ Myungjun dropped the bag in front of the scanner. A dejected beep later, he shoved the bag towards Jinwoo and started on the mountain of snacks for _someone else_. But he definitely didn’t care if Jinwoo wanted to give snacks to _someone else,_ right?

            “They’re for you, silly.” Jinwoo slid the entire pile a little closer to Myungjun.

            Myungjun wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. He spent a few seconds glancing doubtfully between Snack Mountain and Jinwoo, but the other only nodded encouragingly. “Um, thanks,” he said, unsure how to accept the generous donation. “This is a lot…will you at least take _some_ of these? I’ll get a heart attack if I eat them all myself.”

            To his surprise, Jinwoo grabbed one of the stools and seated himself at the counter, pushing Copernicus out of the way. It turned out that this entire time, Jinwoo had been bringing his food and awful energy drinks to eat alone in his truck in the parking lot. For nearly half an hour the other let Myungjun complain about the great historical figures of astronomy and why _none_ of them could write anything that made sense.

            It was during these nights with Jinwoo, in a tiny gas station convenience store on the side of a dirt road, hardly anything else around for miles, that slowly, _slowly,_ Myungjun considered letting his universe be rewritten.

 

            Eight iterations of Newton’s method and Myungjun was convinced he’d chosen the worst numbers to start with. His entire page was filled with matrices, Jacobians, _everything_ he was supposed to have, yet he was barely closer to convergence. In frustration, he threw his pen cap across the store and straight into Jinwoo’s forehead.

            “Hello to you, too,” said Jinwoo, looking somewhat confused as to why he had been assaulted a mere second after walking in.

            _“Sorry!”_ Myungjun shrieked from behind his counter. Frantically ducking down, he considered the possibilities. What if Jinwoo was secretly a serial killer on the nights he wasn’t here, and was triggered by flying pen caps? Well, of course it would have to be _secretly,_ because not-secret serial killers were (preferably) in jail. And Jinwoo wasn’t in jail, so either he wasn’t a murderer, or he was just very good at his job. Could serial killing even be considered a career? Myungjun didn’t know.

            “Myungjun? Are you okay back there?” Jinwoo poked his head over the counter to meet a wide-eyed Myungjun. “I think you dropped your pen cap on my face.”

            “Newton wants me dead,” Myungjun replied, as way of conveying that no, he was not okay.

            Jinwoo easily hopped over the counter – he could _do_ that? – which Myungjun was fairly sure was against the rules, but he gave no protest.

            “Let’s take a look,” Jinwoo hauled Myungjun up by the elbow and began going through the first of the hazardous number of papers.

            As Jinwoo scanned the pages, turning them over with remarkable speed, Myungjun stared, shocked. Though he’d never gotten around to asking what, exactly, Jinwoo had done before driving his truck, he never would have guessed it was anything of this sort.

            “Here, you added the delta to the wrong variable, just…” Jinwoo trailed off as he saw Myungjun’s incredulous expression. “I guess I never told you,” he smiled sheepishly, “I have a degree in mathematics.”

            “You…but…” Myungjun was flabbergasted. “That’s so cool, Jinwoo!” He took the offending paper from Jinwoo and saw that the other was right. “Wait,” he gasped, realizing several things all at once. “How _old_ are you?”

            “I’m twenty-two,” Jinwoo laughed at Myungjun’s jaw dropping even farther. “I took a lot of summer classes and finished a year early.” Myungjun flapped an arm towards the truck parked outside, questioning, and Jinwoo continued. “In my last year, I realized I didn’t want a boring job for the rest of my life, so I decided to do this instead until I find something else I really want.”

            Myungjun spent the better part of the next twenty minutes trying to persuade Jinwoo to do his homework for him. Not that Myungjun couldn’t do it himself, but he was _tired,_ and eventually he settled for having Jinwoo watch him scribble numbers on the page and point out anything he might have missed. He wondered, if the trajectory of his heart was off a little bit, would Jinwoo catch it for him?

 

            The chiming of the door was starting to sound a lot like shooting stars. There were more customers tonight than the average of three or four that Myungjun was used to, and each time the door opened, Myungjun enthusiastically jumped up from his seat, mentally apologizing to Galileo and _The Starry Messenger._ But as the time neared the one he so eagerly awaited, Myungjun became impatient. _Just a little longer,_ he told himself. Two minutes. One minute. A minute _past._ Myungjun frowned, squinting at the clock. That couldn’t be right. Three months, and Jinwoo had _never_ been late once.

            Myungjun grew antsy, looking intently out the door in between sentences until he was reading in between time spent staring. He was in a straight free-fall towards Jinwoo and _so_ close to crashing that he couldn’t have stopped himself if he tried. Something in the reflection of the window caught his eye and he turned to the barely-functional television behind him, displaying a grainy, alarmingly sized fire. Gasping, Myungjun hit the remote as fast as possible to turn up the volume.

            _…an accident has happened off of Exit 102. It appears that a shipping truck flipped over in the rain. No other vehicles were involved. The driver is, unfortunately…_

Galileo fell to the floor at the same acceleration as the beating in Myungjun’s chest.

 

            Over a week passed with no sign of Jinwoo. Myungjun felt pathetic; he’d cried over someone he only barely knew. He didn’t know how much he’d enjoyed Jinwoo’s presence in the store, making his long nights just that much more bearable.

            “Stupid Jinwoo,” he muttered to himself as he restocked the chips. With every fibre of his being, he _refused_ to believe that he could be dead. “Get back here. You didn’t even give me your number, you idiot. What were you thinking in that giant, blond, stupidly handsome –”

            “If you’d wanted my number, you could’ve just asked. I’d have given it to you. Did you just call me handsome?” A familiar voice came up behind Myungjun, crouching beside him, arm thrown around his shoulder.

            _“Jinwoo?”_ Myungjun stood so fast he knocked over the display he’d just spent _forever_ setting up. “What the hell, I thought you died!”

            “I’m sorry I couldn’t come by,” Jinwoo smiled apologetically, looking infuriatingly cute. “They changed my route without much notice.”

            “You –” Myungjun bent down and picked up several bags, throwing them at the other, not caring that there was a chance his manager would review the security footage. _“I thought you died!”_ He repeated, the last bag he had bouncing off Jinwoo’s shoulder.

            “Myungjun, I really wanted to come see you sooner,” Jinwoo pulled Myungjun in for a hug. Myungjun resisted briefly but gave in, huffing with fading anger. “Please believe me.”

            “Fine,” Myungjun stepped back and crossed his arms. Moving quickly, he restored the display to its original, admittedly not-great glory, and leaned back against the counter.

            “So,” Jinwoo said, bringing himself closer. “ _Do_ you want my number?”

…

            Neither Myungjun nor Jinwoo ever did find the ultimate energy drink. Myungjun didn’t need them any longer, having graduated several months ago with honours and Jinwoo’s support. He liked to tease Jinwoo that he would be drinking more of them now after Myungjun had recommended him as a research assistant to one of his professors.

            Jinwoo moved in with Myungjun, both to be closer to school and to _his favourite astronomer,_ as he called him. In the evenings, they watched the stars bloom together, seated on a balcony to see the inspiration of Kepler and Brahe, Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. Some of them had _died_ for the stars after a lifetime of dedication, called mad, work left unappreciated until they weren’t around to see their own legacy. And Myungjun knew, as he fell asleep with an entire galaxy in his arms, he would gladly write a new revolution with Jinwoo.          

**Author's Note:**

> a big thank you to [seal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vonseal/pseuds/vonseal) for helping me work out a plot for this
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](https://eunwoohearts.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/eunwoohearts)!


End file.
